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| by William D. Gagliani Email: tarkusp@execpc.com Brainbox 2 (Son of Brainbox) Edited by Steve Eller Irrational Press http://home.earthlink.net/~steveeller/buy2box.html Paperback $10.00; CD E-book $8.00 Voyeurs rejoice! Those Brainbox people have now wrought a new monster anthology, appropriately nicknamed Son of Brainbox, and sprung it on an unsuspecting world. You may remember that Steve Eller's first Brainbox (reviewed elsewhere above) peeled away the layers of skin and flesh and bone to grant you a peek into the writer's head—was it good for you?—where all those ideas are born kicking and screaming into a world that still offers more horror in the daily news than any one of us can fabricate. The most inane question writers hear is "where do you get your ideas?" and now they can see for themselves. Yes, the glance is about as harrowing as it gets, and sometimes downright moving. This is because the answer is as often as not that writers get their ideas from the things that happen to them and shape them, from the things that scare them or victimize them, and from the things they've done to themselves or others, or both. Gut wrenching is a cliché, but it's also an apt description of many of these stories and their accompanying essays. Anchored by the one-two combination knock-out punch of Brian A. Hopkins and Mort Castle, the final portions of this anthology will leave you reeling. Can anything match the intensity of "Eleven Minutes in September," by multiple-Stoker winner Hopkins? This story touched me where I thought I could no longer be touched. Always the right word, the right detail, the right bit of dialogue swollen with meaning and—here is where the story soars—with genuine emotion. It's a stunningly effective portrait of a few moments captured forever on the retinas of our imaginations and steeped in our fears, and yet it's fraught with hope, too. It's utterly perfect from the first word to the last, as was its Stoker-winning relative, "Five Days in April." Mort Castle adds an uppercut with "I Am Your Need," at once a tribute to a goddess of the screen and a plaintive cry for the loss of a person not nearly as shallow as she appeared and not nearly as confident as she should have been. Indeed, the death of Marilyn Monroe may have been dealt with before, but never in quite this brutally honest yet reverent a way. There will always be more truth in fiction than in a series of dry facts, to paraphrase the Frank Lloyd Wright quote Castle cites in his essay. Here again, this story helps the anthology soar. Other superb works (too many to name) include Richard Wright's "Bulimia Daemonica," which needs little explanation except to say that it captures the heart of a mysterious disease with amazing accuracy and sympathy, Charlee Jacob's poetic "Dreamspike," and d.g.k. goldberg's noirish but all-too-realistic "Shades." Julie Anne Parks conveys the emotion of her "Vigil" at a suicide's bedside, Brett Savory's tight magical realism jumps to "The Time Between the Lights," while Barbara Ferrenz and Karen Taylor's "Happy Mother's Day" takes airport paranoia to its logical conclusion. J. Newman's "Suffer the Children" pokes fun at crazy relatives, while Paul Tremblay's "The Jar" celebrates the familial legacy of magic. Excellent accompanying essays help balance the facts vs fiction equation, if anyone's keeping track, with particularly strong entries by Louis Maistros, Diana Price, Tim Pratt, and Joel Arnold, among others. The uncomfortable truth is that our lives are on display in our fiction, a flimsy construct that often holds as much "cosmic truth" as any nonfiction we'll ever write. Every experience will be dissected, and confession is just a part of the game. Some of these essays and their stories give an occasionally too clear look at how writers process and deal with their traumas, fears, and failings. If there's any quibble at all it's that occasionally the fiction generated, while well-written, does not manage to fly free and become a story in the beginning-middle-end tradition—but if that's the worst charge one can level, then this is a very effective anthology indeed and yet another you won't easily forget thanks to its disturbing nature.
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